In this episode of The John Henry Weston Show, host Johnathan Westendorf sits down with journalist Stephen Cox to discuss Qatar's ban on same-sex marriage at the World Cup, and why it's a big deal to him.
00:00:00.000There's a selective moral outrage taking place here, not just with FIFA, but with professional sports in general, who, again, are all going to the political left.
00:00:09.400The MLB as well, Major League Baseball, they have Pride nights, LGBT nights.
00:00:14.040I'm a baseball fan. I play baseball as well, so it breaks my heart that I have to watch that stuff.
00:00:18.260But it's all over. It's ubiquitous in the elite circles who are trying to drive this narrative now that Qatar is a public enemy number one.
00:00:26.820In fact, the left is hypocritical, very much so on this issue.
00:00:30.000The World Cup is going on in soccer, and there's all sorts of controversy.
00:00:35.520It's a funny kind of controversy, though, because normally the woke mob is all about respecting other people and other countries' traditions.
00:00:47.700Apparently in Qatar, they're very much against the stance that this one country is proposing.
00:00:53.380It's in fact the same stance that even President Obama was promoting less than a decade ago in America.
00:00:59.480Nevertheless, Qatar is being castigated for not promoting allowing same-sex marriage.
00:01:08.580With us to discuss this, we have LifeSite's own journalist, Stephen Cox, who has spoken many times on this subject and all things political in the United States of America.
00:01:19.540This is the John Henry Weston Show. Stay tuned.
00:02:34.940Yeah, so this is the first, you could say, woke World Cup that we've experienced.
00:02:39.060We haven't seen before the dictatorial Western LGBT media really come down on a World Cup as hardly as it has this year.
00:02:46.900And it really began a couple weeks ago at the beginning of the World Cup when the Qatar ambassador for the World Cup appeared on German television.
00:02:55.380And he told an anchor there saying, quote, homosexuality is damage in the mind.
00:03:02.020And you can imagine to a Western audience, especially a liberal country like Germany, just the sort of reaction that engendered.
00:03:09.060The German interior minister denounced those remarks.
00:03:12.700As you know, Qatar has bans on same-sex so-called marriage, as well as transgenderism.
00:03:19.980And so for this remark, they really sparked the big controversy that we've seen during the last few weeks of the competition, which we've seen players, coaches, Western media outlets, everyone come down on them.
00:04:10.000I think, you know, it's a sign of our values and what we represent as a men's national team in U.S. soccer.
00:04:17.520And we're a group that believes in inclusivity.
00:04:20.980And we'll continue to project that message going forward.
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00:05:54.500So, during the competition these last few weeks, England actually took a knee before three of their matches to protest the so-called LGBT oppression in Qatar.
00:06:06.520Wales did this as well, and a number of teams, including England, France, Germany, as well as four other European teams, were planning on wearing a rainbow-themed patch on their shoulder during competition.
00:06:21.180Now, to FIFA's credit, they did say if you do that, you're going to face potential penalties.
00:06:26.880There were threats of yellow cards that were given out, and those teams did not do that.
00:06:31.740But we saw very early on just how much, especially Western European teams, wanted to push the LGBT agenda at this, again, what I call Woke World Cup.
00:06:49.000There's players on those teams that are Christian, and how do they fit into the picture?
00:06:55.660Yeah, well, unfortunately, not many of them said opposition to this.
00:07:01.800You can imagine the sort of pressure put on players going to this event and having their coaches come out.
00:07:07.420The U.S. coach, in fact, said this is an important issue.
00:07:11.200The U.S., again, as I mentioned, they changed their practice facilities to have a rainbow-themed crest.
00:07:16.800And so you didn't see a lot of players oppose this.
00:07:19.880Again, what you saw was a lot of players, especially from England, Germany, and elsewhere, make stands of solidarity to support the LGBT agenda.
00:07:31.900And, again, this kind of goes back to, Jen Henry, what the women's team has done in the last several years.
00:07:36.860The U.S. women's team was one of the leading advocates of the LGBT agenda.
00:07:41.900Of course, the name Megan Rapinoe might be familiar to those who are watching today.
00:07:46.100She was this lesbian activist, again, on the team.
00:07:50.960She won ESPN Sportsperson of the Year in 2019.
00:07:54.100She was very outspoken in her hatred of Donald Trump and her support of the LGBT agenda.
00:07:58.840And a number of women players, in fact, on that team several years ago are active lesbians.
00:08:05.080And so it's sort of rampant in Western soccer that you see them bowing to the LGBT agenda.
00:08:13.880And in my article I wrote for Lifesite, I said, you know, at least in the past, centuries ago, those Middle Ages where we had the Crusades, right?
00:08:22.520The Crusades were fought to defend Christendom, to defend the rights of God and his church against the infidels.
00:08:29.060This year what we saw is the entire Western media apparatus not fighting Crusades and they're advancing this global dictatorial agenda that they're not going to relent on.
00:08:40.760And it's just permeated all aspects of professional soccer at the global World Cup competition this year.
00:08:47.920It's a very interesting comparison because I've said for a long time this woke agenda is a religion.
00:08:54.000It's not, you know, some kind of thing based in science or biology.
00:09:02.260It is itself a type of a religion that they are forcing with the kind of iron fist that, you know, anybody talking about forcing any religion with that kind of iron fist in the West, that would be so shocking.
00:09:31.840And that tells you everything about where this secularist ideology, this religion as you call it, really comes from.
00:09:39.280It's not from God because God is truth, reason, logic, and beauty.
00:09:44.960And what we see in the LGBT agenda is an anti-religion.
00:09:49.080It's the rights of Satan, and it's the rights of really having the freedom to send yourself to hell is really what these activists are wanting.
00:09:57.660And they're trying to legalize all four sins that cry to heaven for vengeance.
00:10:00.880So what they're trying to do is give as many people on the planet the opportunities to sin and to commit very egregious sins in the face of God and his truth.
00:10:11.140And so what we're up against is nothing more, nothing less, in fact, than a diabolical enemy.
00:10:16.620Now, at LifeSite, we have a very particular take on homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and everything else because we haven't just fought same-sex marriage.
00:10:26.860There was a lot of groups that just fought same-sex marriage.
00:10:29.080They said, oh, you can have civil unions.
00:10:32.780It doesn't matter as long as we protect the term marriage.
00:10:35.400What was the point there, if you can explain to everybody, what was the point there of not just singling out marriage like many groups have done, but fighting for the whole thing of the protection of basically God's standard in sexuality?
00:10:49.980Well, we understand that it's all interconnected.
00:10:52.100It's not just a singular issue where you can separate out from all their life issues.
00:10:56.540In fact, when two individuals engage in sodomy, that's an inherently anti-life act.
00:11:03.260It denies the procreative nature of the marital union, as we have now been warning for many years now, John Henry at LifeSite, that this is a very slippery slope.
00:11:14.400And the so-called fight for gay marriage, we always warned that it would come to a much more dictatorial end.
00:11:23.220We have sovereign nations who are defending these principles who can't even get away from it for simply hosting a soccer tournament, okay?
00:11:32.860This is something the devil – you give him an inch, he'll take a mile, and the same thing goes for those who are pushing this agenda.
00:11:41.540So we have to understand that these are not just separate issues you can handle in silos.
00:11:45.960Human beings are not meant for isolation.
00:11:49.800We live in families, in society, in our churches, in our religious beliefs, and they are all interconnected.
00:11:58.540As we can see, when you pull on one of those threads, when you pull on the abortion thread, that logically leads to divorce, that logically leads to what we're seeing today, no-fault divorce, as well as same-sex so-called unions.
00:12:13.340So we have to be very vigilant about all of these issues.
00:12:17.160We can't just focus on one and think, okay, that's all it is.
00:12:21.920It's really, again, the culture of life, and that pertains to gender roles, traditional family unit.
00:12:29.740It pertains to human sexuality and really what we are.
00:12:34.220We're children of God made in his image, and we have to recognize those duties that we have, those obligations we have to him are all-encompassing.
00:12:44.620And it's not just something that you can separate out as some have wanted to.
00:12:54.040And we actually, as the scriptures say, receive in our bodies the recompense for our behavior.
00:12:59.880So we've always known that homosexual acts are linked to all sorts of diseases, not only in the male world that everybody knows about, but also in the female world.
00:13:10.620But it doesn't only stick to homosexuality.
00:13:14.400Of course, every type of aberrant sexuality outside of God's plan for sexuality falls into this same thing, where we beget in our own bodies the disease, literal disease associated with it.
00:13:26.760We've talked about STDs a whole bunch of times and all of the horrors that go along with these sexual practices that are so far from not only God's law, but our own biology.
00:13:38.340And we're physically made for sexual acts to happen in this one way that God ordained, and that's how our bodies are created.
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00:14:20.140Speak a little bit, if you will, about the crush that came before this.
00:14:27.160I think that, you know, before they went out to campaign in the whole wide world, there was all sorts of campaigning to crush religious freedom inside America before it went out.
00:14:38.180Well, what we're seeing actually right now is the Supreme Court is debating another religious liberty issue at the Supreme Court with a photographer who is, again, saying, I am Christian.
00:14:49.320And I am wanting to celebrate the true beauty of true marriage, and that's between one man and one woman.
00:14:56.700And it's incumbent upon the Supreme Court because they have souls too to judge correctly in this case and to not allow this autocratic LGBT agenda to be pushed through.
00:15:08.200Because as we see, as we're seeing now, when the left takes an inch, again, it goes a mile.
00:15:15.180And in order to export transgenderism, LGBT ideology to the rest of the world to fight crusades for it, the left had to go after those in the United States and in the Western Hemisphere under the guise of diversity and multiculturalism first.
00:15:30.640And so what we're seeing in the West and what we're seeing at the World Cup is really a display of what's been going on these last 15 years.
00:15:39.700And as you mentioned at the beginning of your introduction today, I mean, what we are all saying and defending here and what Qatar is even defending is something that the Democrats on the far left believed up until about 20 years ago in the 1980s, 1990s.
00:15:55.400No one imagined that one of the major political parties in the United States would support this.
00:16:02.880Even Hillary Clinton, I think it was in the late 1990s before she ran for Senate in New York, I think in 2000, she said marriage is between one man and one woman.
00:16:11.440So we see the hypocritical nature of the left and who they're bowing to because this is a global effort.
00:16:18.360It's a very sinister effort and we're seeing that come to fruition and as you mentioned rightly, it begins here in the West and now it's beginning to spread outward.
00:16:27.620And I think the new portion of this, because there's been international pressure before, the new portion of this is that it's public.
00:16:34.400Before the international pressure came toward poor countries in the most despicable way by threatening the loss of food aid and other aid to the countries if they didn't legalize homosexuality, same-sex marriage and so on.
00:16:49.040So the countries that are well-to-do, like all the countries of the Middle East, which are rich with oil, they didn't have that sort of ability to be cajoled by, you know, funding and so on.
00:17:02.880So they're getting to them in a different way.
00:17:05.780Well, it's really cancel culture for countries, and we've had that before, as you mentioned, with foreign aid, with strings attached to aid packages.
00:17:16.200Bill Gates, as you know, is one of the worst offenders of this.
00:17:21.020And there's books about this, especially in Africa and those poor nations who are being really held at ransom to say you have to accept our Western hedonistic lifestyle or you get no funding.
00:17:31.700This is something that is continually pushed on at the United Nations, at the European Union, on sovereign nations who have their own rights to determine their own future.
00:17:45.500But the globalists, Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum, and now as we're seeing the sports world with FIFA and others, including the NBA, who is doing all this in China now.
00:17:57.520They're kowtowing to China. And if anyone speaks out against suppression of religion, forced labor there, as our friend Jason Jones has done multiple times about the Uyghurs and their oppression, the NBA is going to come down on you.
00:18:12.360And the same thing again here going for FIFA, as well as other sports leagues, too.
00:18:16.180So it's not just countries. It's not just nations. It's the sports arena as well.
00:18:22.900So, Stephen, you just said that the NBA is kowtowing to China.
00:18:29.740So you mean to say that they are not only not criticizing China, they're not doing this kind of thing that they're doing with Qatar to China for all of its oppression for the Uyghurs and all of its absolutely dictatorial communist insanity.
00:18:46.180No, that's all free and clear, but you can't even criticize it?
00:18:50.160Exactly. I mean, you don't hear LeBron James out there speaking about so-called human rights abuses in China because he knows that it would cost the NBA and the league billions of dollars.
00:18:59.720You do see that, however, with Enos Cantor Freedom.
00:19:03.400He's the former Boston Celtics player who spoke out against Xi Jinping in the Communist Party.
00:19:08.660And you don't see him in the league anymore, do you?
00:19:10.760So he received an award by Christians not long ago for speaking out, and that's what happens at the pinnacle of these sports leagues.
00:19:19.100And the NBA has been doing this for decades.
00:19:21.260They've been trying to expand markets in the name of profit and billions of dollars to China and the Far East for many decades.
00:19:27.640And there's a cozy, very cozy partnership with China at the moment.
00:19:31.580Stephen Moser has spoken about this for many times, how the Chinese suppress religion.
00:19:36.600We know at the moment that they're persecuting the Catholic Church there.
00:19:40.300They've reneged essentially on their deal with the Vatican.
00:19:44.780And so the NBA has been doing this for a very long time.
00:19:47.820You don't see them call out at all the human rights abuses going on there.
00:19:51.840If you recall actually a couple of years ago, Ricky Gervais' speech at the Golden Globes, he called out all of the elite celebrities and corporations for their hypocrisy on dealing with China.
00:20:02.780In fact, he singled out Apple for making a television show about dignity and doing the right thing, all the while making profits off slave labor in China.
00:20:11.120And so it's the sort of elephant in the room that the woke liberal press and Hollywood and sports stars won't go there.
00:20:19.940And there's a lot of hypocrisy to go around.
00:20:21.900This is, again, really what FIFA and the Western media outlets and the teams are doing is just global political virtue signaling.
00:20:29.020And, you know, one other thing that comes to mind is the golf world.
00:20:33.020I'm not sure if you golfed, Sean Henry.
00:20:34.700I've golfed throughout my whole adult life.
00:20:37.020I'm not very great, but good enough to get around the course.
00:20:39.920And there's a new Saudi Arabian-backed league called Live Golf.
00:20:45.340It's headed by a number of prominent players who have jumped into this league.
00:20:50.740And the professional golf and their influencers on television and analysts have come down very hard on this league.
00:20:57.640Now, it's not perfect. Saudi Arabia is not a perfect country by any means.
00:21:01.260They're Wahhabist, and they decapitate people, and they don't fight for Christ the King.
00:21:05.840But it's interesting to me when I watched this league begin that the PGA Tour and their allies in the media strongly, strongly condemned them and said this is Saudi Arabian blood money.
00:21:19.280And I thought to myself, well, okay, well, what about what you're doing in China and other countries across the world that are just as guilty of heinous crimes?
00:21:26.800So there's a selective moral outrage taking place here, not just with FIFA, but with professional sports in general who, again, are all going to the political left.
00:21:36.780The MLB as well, Major League Baseball, they have Pride nights, LGBT nights.
00:21:41.340I'm a baseball fan. I play baseball as well, so it breaks my heart that I have to watch that stuff.
00:21:44.680But it's all over. It's ubiquitous in the elite circles who are trying to drive this narrative now that Qatar is a public enemy number one.
00:21:54.140In fact, the left is hypocritical, very much so on this issue.
00:21:58.420If you want to keep up with Stephen Cox and all of his great reporting at LifeSite News, please go visit our site.
00:22:02.940You can click on all of the author names, by the way, and you can follow them also on Twitter.
00:22:07.240Final thoughts, Stephen, as we depart.
00:22:08.880Well, one thing that should be noted is that Qatar was just made a major non-NATO ally of the United States by Joe Biden earlier this year.
00:22:17.520And, in fact, the U.S. has had billions of dollars in trade of oil with Saudi Arabia as well.
00:22:22.440So these Middle Eastern countries that are now being dunked on by the Western pro-LGBT media, the U.S. and liberal politicians especially, have had very close relationships with them.
00:22:32.400So for at least their own sake, they should definitely call out these countries on all those issues if they really want to be consistent in their message.
00:23:04.860Every single day, there are new developments in the culture war.
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00:23:17.420Subscribe now and never miss an important development in the culture war that you need to know about, all from a faithful Catholic perspective.
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